Katarzyna Kozyra @ Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris

Katarzyna Kozyra, All that beauty
Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris
3 septembre - 1er octobre 2016

Heureuse de représenter désormais l'artiste polonaise Katarzyna Kozyra, la Galerie Christophe Gaillard, à Paris, annonce sa première exposition personnelle en France.

A cette occasion, la galerie présentera l'installation Le Sacre du printemps, remarquée au Centre National de la Danse, à Art Basel Unlimited, au Mumok de Vienne ou bien encore aux Musées de Cracovie et Varsovie.

Figure importante de la scène artistique polonaise actuelle, Katarzyna Kozyra puise dans les mythes anciens afin de mieux parler du présent.

En jouant habilement des contraintes de son medium, Katarzyna Kozyra est parvenue à créer une proposition nouvelle, aboutie sur le plan formel et riche de sens.

L'installation vidéo Le sacre du printemps prend sa source dans l’œuvre éponyme que Stravinsky créa en 1913. Le ballet, sorte de « grand rite sacral païen », a pour sujet le sacrifice effectué par de vieux sages d'une jeune fille afin de se voir accorder pour l'année à venir les faveurs de la divinité du printemps. La vidéo de près de 5 minutes conçue par Katarzyna Kozyra se concentre sur la danse sacrificielle. Le ballet de Stravinsky nous offre le spectacle de la lutte immémoriale des contraires et c'est donc dans la continuité du compositeur russe que l'artiste polonaise élabore son discours dual : masculin-féminin, vie-mort, jeunesse-vieillesse, force-faiblesse. Elle propose cependant une synthèse réussie en situant cette lutte dans la chair même des danseurs.

Leurs corps vieillis et difformes d'anciens danseurs de ballet (dont la plus âgée a 90 ans) sont parés d'attributs sexuels factices, corps androgynes qui exécutent presque malgré eux les mouvements endiablés élaborés par Nijinsky : les mouvements convulsifs de la transe, de la communication avec le monde invisible. C'est donc une bataille intérieure à laquelle nous assistons, le danseur perd son statut de personnage, et il devient les principes qu'il mime. Cela est d'autant plus tangible que la scénographie consiste en un décor dépouillé, un fond blanc qui écrase la perspective et qui abolit l'espace, qui rappelle la substance même dont sont faits les rêves.

L'installation vidéo de la plasticienne dévoie le genre de la danse classique en contournant magistralement l'idéal de perfection véhiculé par la danse. Et elle démontre que les corps et les mouvements parfaits des danseurs classiques ne sont pas les seuls à pouvoir composer un spectacle d'une beauté saisissante. Plus expressifs, ils se livrent à une pantomime envoûtante.

La galerie présentera par ailleurs une série de photographies grand format inédites et une vidéo récente liée au Sacre du printemps et à son travail autour de la Drag Queen Gloria Viagra.

Katarzyna Kozyra vit et travaille à Varsovie, Berlin et New York. Diplômée du département de sculpture de l'Académie des beaux arts de Varsovie et de l'école des beaux arts de Leipzig, Katarzyna Kozyra est à la fois sculptrice, photographe, artiste de performance, cinéaste et créatrice d'installations vidéos. Elle a reçu une mention honorable pour son installation vidéo Men's bathhouse au Pavillon Polonais lors de la 48e biennale de Venise.

    
Galerie Christophe Gaillard
5 rue Chapon - 75003 Paris
www.galerie-gaillard.com

Davies, Grauerholz, Kozyra, Muller-Pohle, Smith at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago

 

The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago, presents exhibitions by five prominent contemporary artists working with photography: John Davies (UK), Angela Grauerholz (Germany), Katarzyna Kozyra (Poland), Andreas Müller-Pohle (Germany), and Seton Smith (USA, resides in France). The works on view have never before been shown in Chicago.

 

JOHN DAVIES

In his silver gelatin prints, John Davies concentrates on investigating the modern landscape as it has evolved from natural to industrial environments. Although his work is informed by documentary photography, he does not present exclusively "objective" perspectives. He is famous for his ability to capture the "edge" between the urban and the rural, with precision and calculated detachment. These rich, black-and-white images of arresting open spaces reveal urban development both in and out of harmony with the natural environment.

 

ANGELA GRAUERHOLZ

Angela Grauerholz's work Sententia I to LXII, 1998, is comprised of sixty-two images housed in a specially made wooden cabinet that resembles a piece of antique library furniture, a fine retail display case, or, when closed, a tomb. To see the images, the viewer must slide the photographs from the case one at a time. The massive cabinet suggests permanence, importance, and authority. The photographs, however, are ambiguous and moody, soft-focus images of transitional spaces: windows, doors, railroad tracks, a fleeting glimpse of passers-by. This juxtaposition of image content and an unusual presentation raises questions regarding the veracity of information housed in historic archives and underscores the role of the archive as a place of intellectual "travel."

 

KATARZYNA KOZYRA

Katarzyna Kozyra made headlines in 1999 as the Polish representative at the Venice Biennale with her video piece entitled The Men's Bathhouse, for which she gathered footage by entering a men's bathhouse in Budapest disguised as a man and carrying a hidden camera. At The Museum of Contemporary Photography she is exhibiting a similar piece, The Bathhouse, 1997, shot clandestinely in a women's spa in Budapest. This video installation, comprising one large video projection and five video monitors, opens with Ingres’s painting The Turkish Bath. The painting, which depicts women as idealized figures fitting perfectly into a circular composition, provides a stark contrast to Katarzyna Kozyra’s video footage, which follows. By presenting the nude figure in its unashamed, unabashed form, she raises issues of voyeurism and privacy rights, as well as drawing attention to the fact that uncorrected, unimproved nudity is not often visible in our culture.

 

ANDREAS MULLER-POHLE

Andreas Müller-Pohle, a founding editor of European Photography magazine, believes that digital work is the purest form of the photographic medium owing to its universality. His Digital Scores I, II, and III, 1995—1998, are digital interpretations of the earliest known photograph, Nicephore Niepce's View from his Study, taken in 1826. In these works, Andreas Muller-Pohle has digitized Niepce's photograph, which presumably had an eight-hour exposure time, translated it into alphanumeric signs, and output it as ink-jet prints. The information contained in the resulting seven million bytes has been distributed over eight squares which are hung four across and two high, with each frame installed eight centimeters apart. In contrast, Andreas Müller-Pohle's video piece Entropia, 1996, shows an industrial shredder destroying photographs, lithographic films, and framed pictures. "What I don't see, I photograph. What I don't photograph, I see," Andreas Müller-Pohle has said.

 

SETON SMITH

Seton Smith's work Pale Guide to Transparent Things, 1997, examines the convergence of spaces: interior/exterior, public/private, real/imagined, past/present. This series is presented as an installation of large-scale (six-by-four feet) color transparencies mounted on light boxes and arranged on the walls and floor of the gallery. Recontextualized in the museum, the images interact with as well as change and add to the architecture of the space itself. Seton Smith's use of soft focus, tight cropping, and monochromatic colors alters the real objects she photographs, including Chinese-style chairs, seats in an auditorium, and institutional fluorescent lights. The resulting series of ambiguous images share a formal unity despite their disparate subjects. These images are unresolved, yet the scenes pictured seem vaguely familiar, as if recalled from dream or memory. "I create scenes, but they are open to interpretation. People project their own experiences onto them," Seton Smith says of this work.

 

Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago

April 8 - June 10, 2000

 

The exhibitions, presentations, and related programs of The Museum of Contemporary Photography are supported in part by grants from The Chicago Community Trust; The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; the Sara Lee Foundation; the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts. This project is also sponsored in part by LOT Polish Airlines and Halina's European Restaurant & Deli. This ongoing series of exhibitions is principally sponsored by American Airlines, the official airlines of The Museum of Contemporary Photography.